Friday Nights at youth club

So as I mentioned in the past, on Friday nights I run a youth club program for teens who have intellectual disabilities. Lately this has been the only leisure I have experienced on a Friday night. The last few weeks have been; Halloween party, movies, skating and this Friday the ceramic cafe. The Halloween party was challenging we are now a combination of the two youth groups together as one with 3 staff and two volunteers. If every one shows up there are 17 teens. So the Halloween party was our group at the YMCA with the YMCA's teen group. It was great fun! The teens all dressed up and so did the staff. They played all kinds of games and went through a haunted house and even had a pinata. They loved it! I didn't do anything else for Halloween party I didn't even go to an "adult" Halloween and It didn't bother me. For me I got to experience leisure in the fulfillment that I got knowing that they had a blast.

Next was skating, quiet the leisure activity..... you have to remember that many of our teens also have many physical limitations and skating is almost impossible or it literally is impossible for most of them. So a lot of them still showed up to the area however they did not skate. The reason we still pick skating as an activity is because we are limited in our options for activities doe to budget and location so we still going skating once. There where 4 teens who brought their skates 2 of them only lasted 15 min on the ice the other 25 min and the last two skated the whole time with some breaks. All the other teens watched from up stairs and colored or just socialized.
What I found to be the most surprising and what reinforces for me why I do this job is that the teens who couldn't skate still chose to stay. Many of the parents asked them if they wanted to go back home since they weren't going to skate but they all wanted to stay. I guess the activity its self is not as important as just being together with their friends.

This past Friday was the ceramic cafe. This activity is great however it costs us a lot of our budget. We get the birthday group rate which is 15$ a person plus tax. We ask the teens to bring 10$ and our budget pays the rest. (our boss's rules) if it was up to me I would ask them to bring 15$ I mean 15$ is a cheap night.

N e ways they get to pick from a bunch of stuff and paint what ever they pick. All of them enjoy it except the boys get bored pretty fast and quiet hyper and unfortunately this Friday I was tired after being sick and already working all day so I had a lot less Patience then usual. But it went really well over all and it cost a total of 218$ which ended up being 80$ from our budget.
Conclusion: leisure is expensive!